


Say Something Before I Go Crazy

by fauxtales



Category: Kingdom Hearts (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Complicated Relationships, M/M, Mostly Canon Compliant, Pre KH3, References to the Manga, Time Skips, Tragedy, canon character death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-04
Updated: 2020-09-04
Packaged: 2021-03-06 23:14:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26287063
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fauxtales/pseuds/fauxtales
Summary: Silence seems to be the only thing that exists between them anymore. Axel thinks that “nothingness” would be preferable to silence.Sometimes, relationships aren't given the chance to be put back together when they start to crumble.
Relationships: Axel/Saïx (Kingdom Hearts)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9





	Say Something Before I Go Crazy

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by "I Go Crazy - Acoustic" by Orla Gartland
> 
> Alternate title: My Heart

Silence seems to be the only thing that exists between them anymore. Axel thinks that “nothingness” would be preferable to silence.

But nothingness is what they are and if nothingness exists between nothingness, then is there anything there to begin with? Can nothing make a sound?

Axel’s mind goes in circles trying to answer these questions, questions that feel like nonsense and ought to be - but they aren’t and that’s the world they live in now - but they aren’t the questions that matter. Or even the ones that he wants answered. The only question he wants answered is Saïx.

The silence stretches between them, impassable and so dense that he can’t be sure he can even see the other side clearly. Saïx doesn’t look like himself anymore, all golden eyes and blank stares and Axel wishes he was anywhere else. These meetings to go over the plan, for Saïx to give him orders and send Axel to do all the dirty work - “Who am I assassinating this time?” - they have become a small eternity of silence. Silence where there used to be music, a melody that Axel loved with all his heart, found easier than any other sound he could make; but that was before Saïx changed. Before Xemnas and Xigbar drew him up to be the Superior’s lapdog. Before they were truly “Saïx” and “Axel.”

Sometimes, Axel wants to scream. Saïx is the one with a real anger problem, the one who becomes violent and lashes out, but Axel’s fuse is so much shorter. The berserker rage that Xemnas has drawn out of Saïx in order to control him may be terrifying, but sometimes, Axel wishes Saïx would turn it on him. Maybe then it would feel like anything he says actually gets through to him.

Axel doesn’t like shouting, but he finds himself doing it now. Saïx is drifting away, the silence a chasm between them, and Axel doesn’t know how else to be heard. Not that his best friend hears him like this anyway. Axel isn’t even sure that his “best friend” is even still in there.

“Why can’t you just answer any of my questions?” Axel pleads, the desperation cracking his voice. This isn’t the first time he’s asked this of Saïx. “You give me these orders, but you hardly explain what they’re for anymore! Am I destabilizing this world for Xemnas or am I taking out a potential enemy for you? I don’t know whose orders I’m following anymore and I don’t like that! And you won’t tell me anything - is it even you who is making these decisions or…” Axel doesn’t know who else would be, but Saïx doesn’t seem much like himself these days. Sometimes, Axel swears he’s talking to someone else entirely.

Saïx doesn’t respond. Axel laughs, harsh and bitter and humorless. “Of course. Why would you ever respond? You don’t talk to me anymore, how could I be so stupid! I’ll never get answers talking to you, only the Superior could ever get that privilege. Tell me, does he have to drag it out of you too, or do you sit on his lap like a good little dog and recite your reports by heart?”

It’s a cruel thing to say and Axel knows it. He doesn’t know what happens behind the locked doors of the Superior’s office, but he’s seen the aftermath in Saïx’s eyes. In the scar on his face. Whatever it is that Xemnas has done to Saïx, it’s nothing good. Saïx has endured a lot to get in his position without being suspected of the treason behind his ambition, and Axel can’t imagine how hard that is.

Saïx doesn’t flinch. He stares at Axel with perfect, practiced neutrality that Axel feels it like a knife in his chest. In another world, in another time, Axel would call it a glare and say that it infuriates him. But nothing can’t feel and the heat under Axel’s skin is just restless fire magic that he can barely control.

“Can’t you just say something,” Axel hisses. “I’m losing my fucking mind here. It’s like I’m talking to a wall with you! I just want…” All the “anger” leaves Axel in a rush and leaves him feeling empty. It’s what his natural state is, according to Xemnas. Everything else is just memory and habit. It doesn’t mean Axel doesn’t crave it with all of his being.

Axel reaches for Saïx’s hand. He catches gloved fingers in his own, pressing closer to the man he used to love, when he could feel such things. His chest aches.

“Isa… please.” Axel doesn’t dare look up at Saïx. He stares at their hands instead, entwining their fingers together as if that could keep the silence at bay a little longer. “Just tell me I’m not losing you.”

There’s a ringing in Axel’s ears. A burning in his eyes. Can nothingness cry?

Saïx pulls his hand from Axel’s and the burning gets worse.

“It’s not your job to question orders, just to carry them out.” Saïx’s voice is cold. Axel has no idea what is going on behind the gold of unfamiliar eyes but he’s sure that something between them just broke, irrevocably. “Do as you are told.”

Axel stares at Saïx’s back as he walks away and lets the shadows of the castle swallow them both in the silence.

\----

Ten years shouldn’t feel so long, yet Saïx feels like he’s aged more than a decade since this all began.

He’s not that old, in the grand scheme of things, but as he stares at Axel yelling about how he won’t talk to him Saïx feels ancient. He’s so very tired, bone-weary in a way that he shouldn’t be at twenty-five. Then again, who knows what the consequences of becoming nothing and housing part of another person in your body are. Maybe that’s enough to age a person beyond his years.

Saïx is not a real person anymore, but that’s irrelevant.

He doesn’t understand why Axel has to act like this. It’s all so simple in his view, all the twining threads and the complicated politics of the Organization clear enough to make Axel’s role so obvious to Saïx. It doesn’t make sense for Axel to ask for more. He doesn’t need to know everything. That would be so much more dangerous. Why does he have to insist on getting answers?

The silence gets to Saïx too, but he doesn’t bother to point it out. It’s not as if he could really say much more anyway. Being too close to Axel is a problem, a liability. That doesn’t mean that Saïx likes it any more than Axel does.

Saïx wishes he knew what to say. He wishes the ringing in his ears following Axel’s yelling would tell him the words to make Axel understand or disappear altogether. There’s no way to fix the crack that has formed between them, and when Axel clings to his hand it takes everything in Saïx to keep himself from collapsing into Axel’s arms as if the crack isn’t there. As if they couldn’t be caught.

When he pulls his hand away, he swears he can see tears in Axel’s eyes. Axel stares at Saïx as if he doesn’t recognize him, as if they haven’t known each other all their lives.

As if Saïx was a monster.

Is that how Axel sees him? A monster? Saïx watches the way Axel looks at him, at the way he looks at the other Organization members. The way he looks at Number XIII. The puppet joins their ranks and Saïx watches how Axel looks at it too and he thinks his world truly has fallen apart under his feet.

“Or put it this way.” Saïx doesn’t want to be having this conversation. Axel keeps questioning his decisions and with how attached Axel is letting himself get to the puppet and Number XIII, it’s getting harder and harder to reason with him. “Which would you rather suffer the loss of: some make-believe friendship, or a real one?”

That hurt look is back on Axel’s face. Saïx wants to convince himself that he enjoys it, that it means that he’s accomplished his goal, but instead it just makes the ache in his chest come back. Axel looks as if he’s seeing past Saïx’s skin, deep into the core of him, and he doesn’t like what he sees. 

He also looks hopelessly guilty and it takes no convincing for Saïx to know he likes that look. It makes the part of him that wants to be bitter seeing Axel smiling with someone else feel better.

Maybe he really is nothing but a monster anymore.

Saïx almost wishes that would hurt.

\----

It’s only a matter of time before it all becomes too much.

Axel can feel that moment rushing toward him, faster and faster, and he doesn’t know what will happen when it comes. He wants to believe he’ll know the right decision to make, be able to do the right thing. But then again, Lea would be appalled to know what Axel has done; he’s no longer the same person and what is right or wrong isn’t so clear anymore.

Roxas runs away again and Xion is gone and Saïx insists that they just need Roxas back to keep things going smoothly and Axel doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do anymore. He’s become torn between opposing sides somehow and he doesn’t even remember when that happened.

He doesn’t want to bring Roxas back to the Organization. But he said it himself when Roxas left; if you betray the Organization, they’ll destroy you. He can’t disobey orders from the Superior. He can’t betray the Organization.

He can’t betray Saïx.

Axel finds himself terrified. He’s stopped bothering to wonder if it’s a real feeling or a habit or a memory; it doesn’t matter anymore. There’s no heart in his chest but he knows that if there were, it would be pounding. Axel is short of breath and the world seems to spin and the rain coming down in The City That Never Was seems unstopping.

The devotion he holds for Saïx hasn’t gone away. That’s the worst part of all of this. All he wants is to cling to Saïx, to be told that everything is going to be okay and all of his decisions haven’t led directly to their demise. Axel thinks he must have lost his mind at some point in the last ten, eleven years since he became a being of nothingness if he’s begun to believe that Saïx would ever offer such comfort.

He misses Isa.

He wishes he could truly leave Saïx.

He wishes that choice didn’t cut through his very being.

Saïx’s claymore solidifies his choice all at once and Axel didn’t realize how hard it was to keep himself together until that moment. He didn’t realize how easily Saïx could destroy him.

Somehow he gets out of the castle, finds the kid that stole Roxas from him, helps him get through the swarming Nobodies. He wants nothing more than to scream, scream all of his pain into the silence that has destroyed them, and let his body finally dissolve into the nothingness it supposedly is. He wants to rest so badly.

When the fight is over and Axel can finally let the flames consume his body the way they always wanted, the burning is back. It’s not in the right place - the fire around him feels like nothing less than bliss and the burning seems to be stuck in his eyes - but that’s alright. He doesn’t fight it this time.

The Not-Roxas cries for him and Axel has to laugh. He wanted to kill this kid to get his friend back. He would have killed him in Castle Oblivion if Saïx had just asked.

“He made me feel… like I had a heart.”

The confession hurts and is incomplete, but he’s not about to give it all to Sora. Roxas may have made him feel like he had a heart, but it was his need to escape the silence that pushed him forward. If only Saïx could have seen that.

If only Saïx could see him now.

\----

The Keyblade’s Champion makes it all the way to the inner castle and Saïx is pleased. It is a pain, certainly, but it is at least a satisfying ending.

Saïx has no illusions of himself surviving this fight.

The light of the moon, of Kingdom Hearts, drags the rage hidden under his skin to the surface and Saïx lets it take over. Axel looked at him like he was a monster at the end and Saïx feels no reason to act like that isn’t the truth anymore.

After all, he killed his best friend.

He felt it, when Axel died. He could feel when any of them died, their strong presence left a hole in the nothing of their world, but Axel’s death felt different. Perhaps it was because they were close. Perhaps it was because he was waiting for it.

Perhaps it was because it’s his fault.

Whatever the reason, it doesn’t matter. Saïx doesn’t want to die, doesn’t want to fade back into the darkness, but there is a part of him that hopes Axel will be there. Whatever is after nothing, if there is anything, Saïx would like to be able to apologize.

This is never where he wanted them to end up.

The Keyblade does its job and Saïx can feel himself fading. He stares up at Kingdom Hearts, the thing that was supposed to be their salvation, and he pleads.

“Kingdom Hearts…”

He never wanted the silence between them to end in their parting. A shuddering breath is almost more than Saïx can muster. 

“...where is…”

How can he breathe when the heat on his skin is gone? Axel was always the one that kept him warm.

“...My heart?”


End file.
